Richard Rohr

Building on the metaphor of the tricycle of faith, Father Richard names that spiritual growth occurs as we pay attention to and learn from our own experiences:    

The two wheels of sacred Scripture and Tradition can be seen as sources of outer authority, while only our personal experience leads to our inner authority. I am convinced we need and can have both. Only when inner and outer authority come together do we have true spiritual wisdom. Christianity in most of its history has largely relied upon official or outer authority, but we must now be honest about the value of inner experience. It was, of course, at work all the time but was not given much credence.   

Information from outer authority does not necessarily lead to transformation, and we need genuinely transformed people today, not just people with answers. I don’t want the words in my books or these meditations to separate anyone from their own astonishment or to provide them with a substitute for their own inner experience. Theology (and authority figures) have done that for too many people and for too long. Instead, I hope my words simply invite readers on their own inner journey rather than become a replacement for it.   

I am increasingly convinced that the word “prayer,” which has become a functional and pious thing for believers to do, was meant to be a descriptor and an invitation to inner experience. When wise spiritual teachers invite us to “pray,” they are in effect saying, “Go inside and know for yourself!” For too long we’ve insisted on outer authority alone, without any teaching of prayer, inner journey, and maturing consciousness. The results for the world and for religion have been disastrous.  [1]  

In our tricycle, experience is constantly balanced and critiqued by Scripture and Tradition. When all three “wheels” work together, we have a very wise person. That’s the easiest way to say it. At the CAC, that’s what we’re interested in doing: raising up not argumentative or righteous people, but compassionate and wise people. That’s our goal. [2] 

Brian McLaren points to the ways that experience created both Scripture and Tradition:  

If we have Scripture, experience, and Tradition around the table, it’s really all experience. Scripture is the experience of a group of people far, far in the past in a very different setting. Tradition is the experience of another group of people who, for a long time, have been interpreting what that first group of people said. Then I come along and with my own experience and a community, which bring all its experience, too. It’s a reminder that we have to be careful if any one person or group tries to edit out anybody else’s experience, because they don’t like it or they find it inconvenient.  

I don’t want to be stuck simply in my own experience. It’s too limited. I need the experience that comes to me from Scripture and from Tradition. At the end of the day, we’re dealing with people’s experiences and interpretations of experience, and we need all the help we can get.

Eileen Norman All three: Scripture/Tradition/Experience are human perceptions……inspired by God, but limited to a time, a culture, a place. Both Tradition and Scripture have been almost completely written, interpreted, and turned into supposedly unquestionable truth by men. That’s less than half the population with predominately one sided responses in the balance of yin and yang. In the beginning of the evolution of humanity, those traits were survival of the fittest. But now those traits unbalanced by the feminine are threatening our democracy and our world.

A balance now needs feminine interpretation and that may need to come from feminine experience.

My favorite authors are Richard Rohr and Anne Lamott and Henri Nouwen. I use them as a balance for my experiences, which have been unexpectedly mystical. They have been powerful and life changing, but I am, along with all humanity, playing an imperfect unfinished hand, that I was dealt at birth and that is constantly challenged and changed by new input from study and experience. Human evolution is not complete, so all of these are also incomplete. It’s a personal spiritual evolution and all of humanity’s also. No human has all the truth and nothing but the truth, but there is a spirit within us that feeds and stretches us to the limits of our personal capacity for knowing, living, and sharing the truth.